i whored for art…

Reading: Hattie Collins, Olivia Rose — This Is Grime

“Paintings on my WhatsApp and my iPhone too”— “Paintings? Like, art?”“something something hashtag merky …”“Merky? What’s Merky?”
“Like he’s got lots of money so he’s driving a Mercedes, like a Merc?”
“Like Wu Tang C.R.E.A.M. or Young Thug Check?”
“Yeah, nah, I dunno, he’s wearing Adidas shower flipflops. Is that especially merky?”
“I dunno even what I’m listening to. What are we listening to here, Frances?”
“Grime. We are listening to Grime. We are edjukating areselfs.”
“Murdering it.”
“What?”
“Merky. Merking, murdering, like killing it, smashing it. Like deadly.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Innernet says so. Also he’s not looking at paintings of ‘The brown skinned girls and the white ones too’, it’s peng ting.”
“What’s that, then?”
“errr … yeah, maybe like poontang? … wait! Innernet says UK slang of Jamaican Patois origin, someone who’s attractive. And ‘ting’ is ‘thing’, so, ‘pretty things’.”
“O. That makes more sense.”
“This Stormzy. This one I like. What else you got?”
“There’s this one called JME? He sings about murking too.”
“I dunno if it’s singing, love.”
“If you don’t know what Grime is, then you must be 86”
“JME, he clocked me listening. And he’s skanking on rollerskates. What’s this one with Giggs? — Did he just work Harry Potter, HSBC bank, and a Uni degree in?”
“… Digestives, cinnamon tea …”
“… !!!”
“I think I’m having that reaction like when I first heard Black Metal!”
“Good, eh? Blame Grime 4 Corbyn.”
“O! So that’s why you’re reading This is Grime, ’cos Corbyn was reading it when JME met him.”
“All of that, yeah.”
“Is it good, then?”
“It’s mad, innit. It’s got photos by Olivia Rose and Hattie Collins did the words.”
“Two women, then? Like when Kemistry & Storm ran the drum & bass scene in the late ’90s?”
“Yeah! I’m just gonna listen to their DJ Kicks set, bangs like all fuck.”
“Reminds me a lot of grime, too, and early-’90s dub, but on 45 instead of 33.”
“So you listened yet to all the grime lot, then?”
“Nah, not yet. Bits and pieces, Tried a couple of the early classics, like Lethal Bizzie, Wiley, Dizzee Rascal …”
“So good! Makes me laugh it’s so good.”
“Lord of the Mics! in Jammer’s basement.”
“Fire in the Booth! NoLay, Lady Lykez, A Dot, Ms Banks, Shystie.”
“You’re repping a lot of women there.”
“Yeah, that’s the problem, like JME said, Too Many Man. Sian Anderson, Julie Adenuga.”
“But the book, what about the book?”
“It’s like this. It’s black and white photos and all these people talking one after the other for 320 pages from before the start when grime didn’t even have a name right up to now, when Stormzy is charting in the UK at No. 1, and grime almost changed a national election in 2017. It’s political, it’s art, it’s so London, it’s so … like, this is the future. Like, the mayor of London is a feminist, Muslim son of working class Pakistani immigrants who grew up in council housing, and grime is a bunch of kids who grew up in Bow E3 in the late ’90s and early ‘00s in council housing. It’s about immigration and colonialism and racism and making art when you’re at the bottom, and then suddenly, you’re not. It’s about history, just as the internet changed how we remember things. It’s London. It’s beautiful. I love it so hard.”